Job-hopping: Just like playing leap frog or hopscotch. But for your career.
It’s pretty much mandatory to judge the next generation of young people, isn’t it? The ones in their filthy 20s especially. Those ‘Gen Y’ and ‘Millenial’ kids are so entitled, etc etc. They walk around the office so confidently, chew their gum so obnoxiously, and switch jobs about as fast as Spotify tracks or Tinder dates.
AND THEIR HEMLINES ARE DISRESPECTFUL.
But hear me out on a radical idea.
What if, rather than willfully underestimating the next generation of employees, we tried to learn something from them? Better yet, what if they secretly know how to revive a dangerous, stagnant corporate culture? Ah? How ‘bout it?
Stay with me. For a start, sure, you were right about the attention span thing. Where most adults stay in their jobs an average of 4.4 years, 91% of Millenials expect to stay in a job for less than three years (according to the Future Workplace Multiple Generations At Work study).
In fact, many of them expect to move jobs in under a year.
Now, you might think short stints at multiple workplaces looks pretty dismal on a resume. And, yeah, if someone fired yo’ ass 12 times in 12 months, I’d agree. But here’s the case for smart job-hopping — which has been, until now, a Gen Y specialty.
Young people move pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look at what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, you might miss ‘em.